Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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William Maxwell

The path to adulthood is littered with broken relationships. 
 
In the suburbs of 1920s Chicago two boys form an unlikely friendship. Spud Latham is slow at school but quick to fight and a natural athlete - Lymie Peters, thin, pigeon-chested and terrible at games, is devoted to him. As they graduate from school to college, tensions start to surface. It is Lymie who first meets Sally Forbes, but it is Spud she falls in love with. This signals the end of their friendship and the rift is almost more than Lymie can bear.

The Folded Leaf

Leo Tolstoy

'If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it' The Times 
 
Tolstoy's enthralling epic depicts Russia's war with Napoleon and its effects on the lives of those caught up in the conflict. He creates some of the most vital and involving characters in literature as he follows the rise and fall of families in St Petersburg and Moscow who are linked by their personal and political relationships. His heroes are the thoughtful yet impulsive Pierre Bezukhov, his ambitious friend, Prince Andrei, and the woman who becomes indispensable to both of them, the enchanting Natasha Rostov. 
 
&lsquo;It is simply the greatest novel ever written. All human life is in it. If I were told there was time to read only a single book, this would be it&rsquo; Andrew Marr 
 
TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

War and Peace

Harold Sonny Ladoo

'A masterpiece of hurt' New York Times 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MONIQUE ROFFEY 
 
In the Caribbean, at the beginning of the last century, a poor rice-growing family struggle to exist. Four siblings pass their days in the ricefield, as does Ma. But Pa is an angry man ready to vent. It is the August rainy season and above their heads the black sky crackles with lightning. 
 
On the day that Pa nearly drowns Ma in a tub of washing water, the children and their mother escape into the cane fields to wait out Pa's rage. But eight-year-old Rama, catches a chill in the rain and falls ill. What follows is a tale of the inheritance of loss. It contains a heart-stopping intensity that places it as one of the greatest Caribbean novels ever written. 
 
'It is a novel unconcerned with anything but truth-telling' Dionne Brand 
 
'To anyone who knows Caribbean literature his novel is infamous, and Ladoo is seen as one of the region's great literary stars' Independent 
 
'Ladoo drags you through this terrific hurricane, and you can never forget it' Amanda Smyth, author of Fortune

No Pain Like This Body

The forgotten classic masterpiece of Trinidadian literature

Günter Grass

To compensate for his unusually large Adam's apple - source of both discomfort and distress - fourteen year old Joachim Mahlke turns himself into athlete and ace diver. Soon he is known to his peers and his nation as 'The Great Mahlke'. But to his enemies, he remains a target. He is different and doomed in a country scarred by the war. 
 
Cat and Mouse was first published in 1961, two years after Gunter Grass' controversial and applauded masterpiece, The Tin Drum. Once again Grass turns his attention on Danzig. With a subtle blend of humour and power, Cat and Mouse ostensibly relates the rise of Mahlke from clown to hero. But Mahlke's outlandish antics hide the darkness at the heart of a nation torn by Nazi violence, the war and its aftermath.

Cat and Mouse

David Grossman

Momik, the only child of two survivors, is brought up in Israel by a family seeking to ignore the past. No-one will explain to him what life was like 'Over There' or what the 'Nazi Beast' is. His 9-year-old mind imagines a Nazi Beast hiding in the cellar, waiting to feed on Jews. Momik increasingly shields himself from all feeling and attachment. But through the stories his great-uncle tells him-the same stories he told the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp-Momik, too, becomes "infected with humanity." 
 
See Under: Love is a luminously imaginative and profoundly affecting work.

See Under Love

Alexandre Dumas

All for one, and one for all! 
 
The young D'Artagnan and the legendary musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis are 'the inseparables' - ready to sacrifice everything in a duel or game of dice in order to defend their honour or that of the King and Queen of France. Handsome and hot-tempered, they dive into raging battles or back-street conspiracies with gusto, especially if by their daring deeds they can thwart the wicked devices of their arch-enemy, Cardinal Richelieu, and his mysterious accomplice, Milady de Winter. 
 
'Pure swashbuckling pleasure' Daily Telegraph 
 
TRANSLATED BY WILL HOBSON 
 
VINTAGE FRENCH CLASSICS - six masterpieces of French fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

The Three Musketeers

Vintage Classics French Series

Josef Skvorecky

THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS spins its own story from the torn entrails of Central Europe. yet what emerges is comedy - clack, grimacing and explosively funny, as peculiarly middle European as the despairing wit of prague's own Franz Kafka' Time

The Engineer Of Human Souls

An Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life,Women,Fate,Dreams,the Working Class, Secret Agents,Love and Death

Nevil Shute

After Philip Stenning is involved in a near-fatal plane crash, he feels he owes a debt of gratitude to the man who rescued him. However, his mysterious saviour is an escaped convict, and his determination to help him leads Stenning into a tense and dramatic adventure of intrigue, drug-running and murder.

Marazan

Kurt Vonnegut

J'ailbird has the crackle and snap of Vonnegut's early work - his best since Cat's Cradle. Using the laid-back, ironic voice that has become his stademark, Vonnegut combines fiction and fact to construct an ingenious, wry morality play' - Newsweek 
 
Vonnegut's riotous urban fairytale about the various fiascos of the Nixon years - a firm fan favourite 
 
Walter J. Starbuck’s life was on the up. With a Harvard education, a job in federal government and then in Nixon’s White House, everything was going great. Only things took a truly spectacular turn for the worse when his involvement in the Watergate scandal landed him in jail. 
 
Now, as the brave new world of the 1980s dawns, Starbuck is finally free and on his way back into the world. This is the story of the first twenty-four hours after his release, told with Kurt Vonnegut’s razor-sharp wit and satirical bite.

Jailbird

Natsume Soseki

Discover the original Japanese Cat classic, now in a vibrant new translation by Nick Bradley, author of The Cat and the City. 
 
'I am a Cat. But I still don't have a name...' 
 
Once a stray kitten, I Am a Cat’s narrator finds himself adopted by a local scholar and thrown headfirst into the absurd upper middle-class world of Meiji-era Japan. Now a noble but somewhat world-weary observer, he has ample opportunity to dissect the strange ways and convoluted conversations of the human race. 
 
First published at the turn of the 20th century, and regarded as one of Japan’s most iconic classics, I Am a Cat is a captivating exploration of identity, society, and the often bewildering nature of the human condition—all seen through the eyes of a very special, uncompromising cat. 
 
‘A biting satire of Meiji-era Japan' Jessie Burton, Guardian 
 
‘Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature’ Haruki Murakami

I Am a Cat

Volume One

When Peter Moran picks up a man on the roadside while driving through a bitter rainy night on the South Downs, he embarks upon an adventure that will lead him into treasonous international plots, flying adventures and tests of both his bravery and his loyalty.

So Disdained

Julian Barnes

Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by an obsession with the French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert. 
 
As Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous amount about the writer’s work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking details about Geoffrey himself. 
 
A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour-de-force of seductive originality. 
 
‘Unputdownable... A mesmeric original’ Philip Larkin 
 
‘Delightful and enriching...a book to revel in!’ Joseph Heller 
 
‘A wry and graceful book... Unfailingly sharp and often very funny’ Sunday Times 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR TO MARK THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST PUBLICATION

Flaubert's Parrot

Raphael Sabatini

Ready of wit and skilled of blade, the elegant surgeon-buccaneer Captain Blood is ever a jump ahead of his foes. Time and again, he falls headlong into deep peril, and his own motley crew are happy to sail to hell and back at his command. Yet when everything is stacked against him, can he keep his honour until the bitter end?

The Fortunes of Captain Blood

Roberto Bolaño

Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was once the quiet, unknowable, unpromising member of Chile&rsquo;s young poetry scene. 
 
But the military coup of 1973 sees Alberto reborn as Chile&rsquo;s leading celebrity poet, Carlos Wieder. Known for his daring sky poems, penned in smoke high above the cities, Weider&rsquo;s dazzling trajectory is a cause for astonishment and speculation amongst his old poetry friends. Where did this talent suddenly spring from? And, how is it connected to the disappearance of the beautiful Garmendia twins? 
 
Told from across the years in exile in Europe, the narrator&rsquo;s attempts to trace the fate of his old circle will lead him to one last confrontation with the brutality of their generation. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
&lsquo;Roberto Bolaño's universe &ndash; huge, interconnected, polyphonic &ndash; is formed from the collision of a wicked sense of humour and a vast and white-hot moral fire... His oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century&rsquo; Lauren Groff 
 
&lsquo;For stunning wit, brutal honesty, loving humanity and a heart that bleeds into the simplest of words, no other writer ever came close&rsquo; Marlon James

Distant Star

Charles Dickens

‘The image of little Oliver Twist victimised by poverty, almost seduced by the specious excitement of crime, and then offered the possibility of a lucrative career in authorship is always compelling’ Guardian 
 
Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape. In Oliver Twist, Dickens graphically conjures up the capital's underworld, full of prostitutes, thieves and lost and homeless children, and gives a voice to the disadvantaged and abused.

Oliver Twist

The decision to invite his Southern relatives to stay proves a fateful one for Austin King. By the time they leave, his reputation and his marriage have suffered irreparable damage. Against the perfectly-drawn background of small-town Illinois at the turn of the 20th century, Maxwell once again uncovers the seeds of potential tragedy at the heart of a happily-established family.

Time Will Darken It

Vasily Grossman

Life and Fate is an epic tale of twentieth-century Russia told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stalingrad. 
 
As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war. 
 
Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece. 
 
'One of the finest Russian novels of the 20th century' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Compelling... Grossman's portrait is timelessly relevant... Life and Fate is worth all the audience it can find' The Times 
 
VINTAGE CLASSICS RUSSIAN SERIES - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.

Life and Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

The great Russian 20th-century novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stalingrad. 
 
Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war. 
 
Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece. 
 
"Compelling... Grossman's portrait is timelessly relevant... Life and Fate is worth all the audience it can find" The Times

Life and Fate

Toni Morrison

Joe Trace &ndash; in his fifties, door-to-door salesman, erstwhile devoted husband &ndash; shoots dead his eighteen-year-old lover. 
 
At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life. 
 
'Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past.... Morrison's voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers' Guardian 
 
'She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption, a kind of relief' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New York Times 
 
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**

Jazz

W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham found a parallel to the turmoil of our own times in the duplicity, intrigue and sensuality of the Italian Renaissance. Then and Now enters the world of Machiavelli, and covers three important months in the career of that crafty politician, worldly seducer and high priest of schemers.

Then And Now

Anthony Burgess

'Like all good comic writers Mr Burgess lives his creations as much as he writes them. First class' 
Observer 
 
Anthony Burgess was an officer in the Colonial Service. In The Malayan Trilogy - Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East - he satirises the dog days of colonialism. Victor Crabbe is a well meaning, ineffectual English man in the tropics, keen to teach the Malays what the West can do for them. Through Crabbe's rise and fall and a series of wonderfully colourful characters, Burgess lays bare racial and social prejudices of post-war Malaya during the upheaval of Independence.

The Malayan Trilogy

Iris Murdoch

As the Easter Rebellion looms, tension mounts in the rain-soaked streets of Dublin. Tension is also ratcheting up at home. Pat Dumay is a Catholic and an Irish patriot. His relentlessly pious mother pursues her own private war with his stepfather, a man sunk in religious speculation and drink. Meanwhile Pat's Protestant soldier cousin, Andrew Chase-White, puzzles out his complex emotions about Ireland and the girl he loves. Weaving between them moves Millie Kinnard: fast, feminist, and only just respectable.

The Red and the Green

Joseph Heller

Discover Joseph Heller's hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man's efforts to survive it. 
 
It's the closing months of World War II and Yossarian has never been closer to death. Stationed in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, each flight mission introduces him to thousands of people determined to kill him. 
 
But the enemy above is not Yossarian's problem - it is his own army intent on keeping him airborne, and the maddening 'Catch-22' that allows for no possibility of escape. 
 
'The greatest satirical work in the English language' Observer 
 
'The most devastating satire ever written about the lunacy of war and military bureaucracy' Antony Beevor 
 
INTRODUCED BY HOWARD JACOBSON

Catch-22

A special edition of the classic world war two novel

Michael Ondaatje

Booker prize winning author Michael Ondaatje invites you on a brutal, beautiful journey into the American West. . . 
 
At twenty-one years old, Billy the Kid has killed a man for each year he’s been alive. 
 
Roaming the blasted planes of the Wild West, he moves between friends, foes and lovers, fighting to keep just one step ahead of the law. Yet in this twisted wasteland – a country of mad dogs, of sweat and gore and blinding heat – the sheriffs play dirty too.Melding prose, poetry, imagined interviews and ephemeral photography, Ondaatje weaves together a lyrical reinterpretation of Billy’s short, infamous existence, forming a portrait of a young man, and a young country, borne out of violence, threaded through with disaster, yet rich in wonder. 
 
‘Ondaatje’s language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art.’ Annie Dillard 
 
'Ondaatje’s eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint' Larry McMurtry

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Stella Gibbons

On the dunes west of Bruges, two-year-old Ydette is found wrapped in a blanket and taken back to live in a small grocer's shop. Opposite the shop live the wealthy van Roeslaere family and their son, Adriaan, a spoilt boy, plagued by ugliness. With overtones of Beauty and the Beast, their romance matures as they grow up together and learn what should truly be valued in life.

White Sand and Grey Sand

Bruce Chatwin

On the Black Hill is an elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the twentieth century. 
 
In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis and their interactions with their small local community Chatwin comments movingly on the larger questions of human experience.

On The Black Hill

Boris Pasternak

From the acclaimed translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, a stunning new translation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece, the first since the 1958 original. 
 
Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds, and in love with the tender and beautiful nurse Lara. 
 
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have restored the rhythms, tone, precision, and poetry of Pasternak's original, bringing this classic of world literature gloriously to life for a new generation of readers.

Doctor Zhivago

Christopher Isherwood

After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.

Mr Norris Changes Trains

Ottessa Moshfegh

VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIES 
Spine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics. 
 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE* 
**FROM THE AUTHOR OF TIKTOK SENSATION MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION** 
 
Trapped between caring for her alcoholic father and her job as a secretary at the boys' prison, Eileen Dunlop dreams of escaping to the big city. 
 
In the meantime, her nights and weekends are filled with shoplifting and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father's messes. 
 
When the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted, unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship. But soon, Eileen's affection for Rebecca pull her into a crime that far surpasses even her own wild imagination. 
 
'Fully lives up to the hype. A taut psychological thriller, rippled with comedy as black as a raven's wing, Eileen is effortlessly stylish and compelling' The Times 
 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA NEW BLOOD DAGGER AWARD*

Eileen

Alfred Assollant

Introducing the Marvellous Captain Corcoran – he is charming to ladies, courteous to true gentlemen, death to pirates and merciless to the English. He speaks several languages, can bend an iron bar with his bare hands, and has adventured his way across the seven seas with his faithful friend Louison by his side. Loyal only to her master, Louison can be a little boisterous, and there’s devil to pay when she misses a meal (she is a tiger, after all). 
 
Corcoran is on the hunt for a lost sacred Hindu text. Once in India, he is soon distracted from his quest by the claims of Prince Holkar, his lotus-eyed daughter, and their daring stand against the English occupying forces. 
 
Beloved by many French schoolchildren (including the young Jean-Paul Sartre) at the turn of the century, the marvellous Corcoran has been too long forgotten. Sam Miller (author of Strange Kind of Paradise: India through Foreign Eyes) has loving translated these wild, funny, unabashedly romantic adventures from the French for the first time so that the Captain and his charming Louison can be embraced by a new generation of readers, young and old.

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